Dawson/Magic

Basics

• Blue-Collar Warlock: His materials are inexpensive, commonly available and generally what’s on-hand. His magic is fairly straightforward, working-class and without many frills. Summoning spirits and calling hellfire to your hands is great but it doesn’t keep gas in your bike. So he had to find something to pull in cash. He’s the guy who would spend his evenings pouring over Chinese take out while piecing together a carburetor set out on a table before heading out for a midnight hookup or a late night conversation with the thing that lives in the fire. He’s usually trying to find some way to get a payday to keep the wolves at the door.

Approach

• Grimoires: Not everyone can have a library stacked with ancient tomes but not every secret needs to be bound in goat skin. Composition journals and spiral notebooks are more his speed. Most of the occult stuff out in the world is absolute crap worthless but but he’s started collecting those few things that seem to work. His books of rituals look like a gothling took a class in scrapbooking; full of pages torn from books, handwritten scrawl, diagrams in marker, cheap photocopies, etc.
• Sanctum: His dabblings with magic hasn’t gotten him incredible amounts of money but he’s well on his way. Without a house or a place that he could claim as his own, he’s had to make accommodations. He’s created a small altar in an old basement of a forgotten building in a neighborhood that’s been erased from memory. The altar was made from wooden shipping crates, a dirty, red blanket as a cloth, candles and a black-handled knife he uses for some of his ritual work. Everything can fit in a gym bag and he can move the boxes back in place when needed.
• Got Friends On the Other Side: He's a summoner of spirits - typically not the ones found in nature - unless you count the elemental forces. He calls upon servants of darkness, flame, the occasional ghost and such but he's also been known to summon a spirit of healing should a member of his crew need a quick patch.

Ritual Tools

• Fire: is at the heart of nearly everything he does, magically. It was through fire that he made his first contact with a spirit and by that initial bargain he has learned more and more ways to strike out at the people and things that piss him off.
  • Candles: Those times when he can’t use a bonfire to add to his magic he uses candles as small points of fire set around the circles he uses to focus his power.
  • Fire Pit: A few scraps of wood from an old shipping pallet, is usually enough to pull together enough fire for his average magical working - the stuff that’s more brute force than fine and precise work.
  • Bonfires: This is for the BIG magic; the stuff where he’s calling up spirits, offering sacrifices and looking to make deals.
• Bones: As a physical manifestation of death, he uses bones (skulls, knuckles, femura, etc.). Skulls are his favorite focus, vertebrae are good to hold candles and femora are great for wands and to twin around for a magical circle.
• Blood: Sacrifice is important - but usually only for the big stuff. Sometimes it’s his and sometimes it’s from someone else.
• Sex: Sex can make you feel powerful - feel alive. And if it doesn’t then you need to find someone else to do it with. Sometimes it’s about using it to help get what you want - sometimes it’s the only thing you want. But the sex he uses isn’t what most would call compassionate; it’s fuel. So he usually has to find someone who will stick around because they’re being paid - or want something from him.
• Drugs: Everything from a 40 ounce to a bit of heroine can alter your personal reality - even if only for a moment or two. Ancient man has been using mind-altering things to glimpse the other world so it’s just a matter of taste. He doesn’t use these often, not for his magic, because he doesn’t like the feeling of being out of control. It leaves him weak for too long.